Chen’s works, which local critics often associated with the work of French photographer Christian Bolanski, was referred to by most other photographers as “photographs in a box”. And sure enough, in his works a series of photographs used in. concep-tual presentation and placed inside an antique box or candy rack, demon-strated a strong willed artist whose creative approach is free from cliché’s and incoherent sentimentalism. In his manipulated processes of conceptual art, photographs are commonly used for their literal content, whether they be his own photographs or others, seen and felt as the imagined representation of a person.
FAMILY BLACK BOX
Born in the Pescadores, and island off the east coast of Taiwan ,Chen Shun-Chu’s childhood days were filled with loving memories of the special climatic and social conditions of his hometown and his family. Even after his university education in Taipei, and his subsequent travelling and exploration of fine arts in Europe, Chen Shun-Chu’s work remains an extension of the hidden monologue of his family history.
His earlier social and environmental landscape photography – “image and imagery” exhibitions in 1990, although taken at the Pescadores, did not entirely express the details and appertenances of the artist’s identity. It was not until his “Family Black Box” exhibition series at It-Park Gallery, Taipei back in 1992, that one could truly experience how he used photography to help project a complex family memory into the structure of a relevant image.
Using old family portraits and antique boxes, his photography installations were not simply about faces and expres-sion to look at. They were also about births, clothings, furniture, wall paper-all celebrated intimacy and personal emotion in the context of a family’s bond and relationship.
Chen agrees that his “Family Black Box” series which brought him much recognition was very much a result of new emotional experiences through the discovery of nostalgia. This nostalgia mainly evolved around personal lives and fantasies, especially his fantasy about death which was of special interest to Chen having personally witnessed the sudden death of his father at the age of 17 as well as experienced the loss of his grandparents. It is against this background that these traces of the past play a major role in the form of recurring icons such as images of dead animals, deceased relatives, graveyards, and antique objects.
The three-dimensional pieces show more than binds people together; it is about a ritual of life, time and place.
THE FAMILY WATER TANK
From the choice of theme to composition, to format, to choice of print quality, the artist’s goal was to define a literal and spiritual space around the subject and not a mirror reflection of the reality.
This is most clearly demonstrated in the installations, in which he used badly re-printed or out-of-focus old portraits, with the purpose to direct attention to the emotional core of the work. This idea was then carried forward on a magnified scale in Chen’s second major exhibition, ”The Family Water Tank” in 1993. Here he used bigger portraits and objects in a wider space, while geometrical forms and structures were adopted in an attempt to explore another dimension of space and place. By constructing these scenes at the venue itself, Chen Shun-Chu wanted to change the story-line of these conceptual presentations into an ambiguous, and yet more logical expression. The use of round, triangular and rectangular shaped well, a pyramid and a water-tank, and invited the discovery of something foreign as well as the recognition of something familiar.
CONFERENCE FAMILY PARADE
Chen admitted that he is very critical of his own creativity, and at the same time, as an artist, he is plagued with doubts. This combination results in the non-stop questioning of his own ideas which, according to Chen, is a slow and long process based on an evolution of manipulative processes in the different stages of mind and space. In his recent one man show “Conference. Family Parade” at La Laverie Photo Space in Paris, the artist been developing since 1992 with he took of two families.
Like the process of creating a sculpture, the portraits were first taken at various different times and in different spaces. They were then cropped and framed individually before being finally installed in the chosen environment. The original works were installed outdoors, by attaching these portraits to the exterior and interior walls of an abandoned house and by placing them on an open space in suburb of Taipei and in the Pescadores.
In his celebration of family and the ritual of life and death, these images resemble portraits of our ancestors which were commonly found hanging on the walls of the walls of the old family houses or on graveyard stones.
SIZE AND SPACE
As one can imagine, this uncon-ventional idea of presentation has a number of limitations. For example, the choice and size of portraits was rather critical. Chen chose 8 x 10 because to him it is the only size which is small enough to look like family portraits and yet big enough to be viewed from a distance. Space was also a big prob-lem. Although the original idea was to exhibit outdoors, the artist understood that the project could only reach his audience in the venue of a gallery.
Therefore, the luxury of exhibiting in a larger space needed to be questioned.
In addition, as framing and cropping became progressively more labor intensive, and presentation more ambitious, the cost of producing hundreds of prints and frames became an important concern as well.
But regardless of these constraints, Chen Shun-Chu is in no rush to material-ise his fantasies and adventurous ideas all at once. Earlier this year, he received a grant from a fine arts foundation to continue his experiments in photo-graphic projects in the United States next year. The artist plans to take one picture every day and to send it back to Taiwan as a record of his sojourn abroad. He hopes this new experience will provide him with new ideas which he can use in a different kind of structure of yet another time and space as a reflection of the endless dialogue between the inner spirit and form.
(CHEN SHUN CHS’S PICTURES ONTHE WALL by BECKY CHO) |
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